4.08.2014

8 Hours in Zheng Zhou

On our way back to China, away from the sunny, warm & beautiful Thailand, sigh, we had an 8 hour lay over in Zhengzhou. We were pretty excited about such a long layover because it meant the opportunity to explore another city before ending our vacation. I looked up Zhengzhou online and found zero point zero things to do in Zhengzhou so we decided to do what we do best, find a Starbucks.

Zachary was so excited to be arriving in Zhengzhou & back in China that he could barely keep his eyes open. Bless his heart. He sleeps so easily and peacefully while flying. This is my view for all our flights.

Window on one side, Zachary sleeping on the other. Zachary sleeps like a baby, meanwhile, I'm on the other side, cutting sores into my thumbs and pointer finger from picking my split ends, the.entire.flight. And writing 1 through 60 for every hour we are flying, so that I can cross out each minute as it passes, like some crazy person.

Upon on arrival in the freezing cold Zhengzhou, Bangkok sun no more, we headed outside the airport to find a taxi. It was 7 am, since our flight left Bangkok at 2 am, so it was the perfect time to head to Starbucks. We hopped into a taxi and told him to take us to the nearest Starbucks. A Starbucks which turned out to be apart of a bigger building, with no walls, and at 7:30 in the morning was freezing cold. For 5 to 6 hours we froze in Starbucks, spent time with Jesus, tried to sleep, drank a gajillion hot drinks and got a tiny view of Zhengzhou.

Zhengzhou is a transportation hub in China. While there is not much to do, there is a million places you can go via Zhengzhou.

Snow and the remnants of Chinese New Year. scrap upon scrap of fire crackers. Also, a good view & reminder that we're back in China. Cigarette butts, dirty snow and trash.

Back to the winter gray.

I did like the bike lanes we saw in Zhengzhou.

After our Starbucks tourism we went back to the airport to pick up our bags at the Left "Luggag" area. The ladies were so sweet and helpful explaining to us the whole process of leaving our bags. It took a while and again, we were reminded, that we were back in China. Gone was the land where everyone spoke English.

This little kid was chilling out waiting for his dad to pick up all of his left "luggag."

And this kid was having a crazy good time rolling around the whole airport and nearly knocking everyone over on his very own luggage cart. His parents were totally chill, like their kid was quietly waiting in line or something.

There's lots of fun choices for kids at Zhengzhou airport. I'm not gonna lie that I was slightly jealous of this kid who got to be pushed around by his parents in a helicopter while I had to, get this, carry my bags! So lame.

Back on the plane and Mr. Mosby is back to his favorite airplane activity, "Sleep peacefully while Heather has nervous break downs." ;)

There he is! Finally woke up for a wife selfie.

Flying back in to our Beloved Qingdao. Despite the fact that it was still cold, the skies were gray, and we were no longer in Thailand, we were excited to be back home & were happy to add another Chinese city to our list of cities visited. Let's not get technical about the fact that we saw nothing in Zhengzhou, okay?